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Comment by throwaway889900 | Hacker News Reader

Got death threats because I wasn't prioritizing stuff people were requesting, said nah I'm done

I open sourced a portable benchmark program and was getting angry responses because I wouldn't accept changes to make it Linux-specific.

Just tell them to fork it. Done. No need to take any grief you do not want.

Probably a bit rude, but maybe we can all agree to accept "fork off" as an acceptable, concise, and descriptive answer to unwanted requests.

“Go fork yourself.”

i'd go with "go fork it yourself". more correct, and less direct. makes it more like a creative insult where the recipient has to think whether they have actually been insulted or not.

I've enjoyed using "Looking forward to your fork/PR!" for a long time now. Caveat: I dont have any big projects nor anything that brings me money or fame. It is possible my slightly snarky responses have limited the projects' potential so consider what you're trying to get out of your open source before following any advice.

Self-plug for a tongue-in-cheek license I wrote to say exactly that, for exactly this reason :) https://codeberg.org/klardotsh/fork-off-public-license

Fully agreed. FOSS maintainers don't owe you anything. You can ask for whatever you want, politely, but accept no or "maybe when I have the spoons, which may be never" as an answer, and don't push.

> If you've received source code with this license attached, you are free to build, run, and/or redistribute it.

Maybe insert a few more rights here, like "modify"?

Sure! Maybe I'll finally get a v0.99 or a v1.0 together one of these days.

Lovely people no?

I had death threats once for raising a github issue!

were you working on an emulator perchance?

Nope.

I've only recently had exposure to just a bit of the emulator world. Even the nice people aren't nice. No idea what the story is there but wow.

I literally had someone tell me that I’m a coward and a psychopath because I didn’t prioritize solving their problem: https://github.com/devnoname120/vhbb/issues/75#issuecomment-...

I don’t regret open-sourcing this project but god as your project becomes popular bad apples start joining and ruining the party for everyone. Fortunately it’s only a tiny minority, but it’s what stays the most on your mind.

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